The EDP We Care Appeal has a long history of battling for funding from the lottery.The appeal won support from the Millennium Festival Fund early on to help pay for its leaflets, publicity posters and collecting tins through a £23,000 grant.

The EDP We Care Appeal has a long history of battling for funding from the lottery.

The appeal won support from the Millennium Festival Fund early on to help pay for its leaflets, publicity posters and collecting tins through a £23,000 grant.

But when the Norfolk Millennium Trust for Carers approached the National Lottery in 2000 it was turned away because it was set up as an endowment.

So, the trust and the EDP launched a major campaign to change the law to enable endowment charities around the county to apply for lottery grants. After a hard-fought campaign, which won the cross-party support of the county's MPs as well as backing from MPs around Britain, the lottery law was finally amended in 2003.

But bitter disappointment was to come when the trust's subsequent bid for lottery money failed.

The application for £½m to bring the appeal total to its £1m target was turned down because the lottery said it could not be sure that it offered sufficient value for money. It preferred money to be spent immediately rather than invested to provide a long-term income.

And so the trust turned instead to the community fund, which gave £50,000 a year for two years, followed by a similar two-year extension, which has helped to pay for white goods, computers and wheelchair power packs as well as covering the trust's running costs. That funding ends next month.

Last August, the trust submitted an outline bid to the Big Lottery and was given the go-ahead to apply to Reaching Communities in October 2006.

Yesterday, the news came that the £250,000 bid was unsuccessful.